Night of the Comet

Director: Thom Eberhardt
Writer: Thom Eberhardt
Released: 1984
Cast: Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran, Mary Woronov, Geoffrey Lewis

I remember not thinking very highly of Night of the Comet when I was a kid. The story of two teenage girls, free to shop to their hearts' content after the tail of a passing comet has obliterated every living thing on the planet that had not spent the night in a steel structure, didn't hold much in the way of excitement for a thirteen-year-old boy. Years later, and - one must hope - much, much wiser, I must concede that, while it didn't grab me at the time (I was an ardent devotee of the Slasher genre, so if it didn't feature a madman in a mask hacking up oversexed teens, it wasn't for me), it wasn't bad. But, I must stipulate, neither was it as good as it could have been.

Just before Christmas, a comet that hasn't been seen in 65 million years ("The last time this comet came, the dinosaurs disappeared" proclaims the poster, in the worst tagline since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's "What happened is true... now the motion picture that is just as real") passes close enough to Earth to bathe the sky in a pinkish/orangish hue. Those who weren't out in the open when the comet passed, but also weren't fortunate enough to have spent the night in a garden shed, for example, or the back of a semi trailer, or making it with some guy in the steel-lined projection booth (!) of the local movie theater, these people slowly dehydrated, went mad, and - as would follow - turned to cannibalism.

Our Heroines, Regina (the always awesome Catherine Mary Stewart) and her annoyingly oblivious little sister, Sam (Kelly Maroney), aided by a friendly trucker named Hector (Eating Raoul's Robert Beltran), are left to fight off not only the Zombies but a team of scientists who, while safe in their underground desert bunker on the titular Night, are now slowly turning into Zombies themselves because - get this - someone left an air vent open. Eggheads! The scientists, led by ever-reliable Geoffrey Lewis, are rounding up non-zombified survivors and draining their blood in the hope of finding a cure.

Okay, there's some potential there, I grant you. Post-apocalyptic world, zombies, evil scientists: all earmarks of a great B-Movie. And Night of the Comet sticks close enough to its B-Movie roots not to take itself too seriously. The downside is, it sticks so close that it can't take itself seriously enough to transcend those roots and become something more, something relevant, and preferably, something scary.

What few scares the movie does offer are limited to John Carpenter-like music stings and shadows moving quickly in front of the camera. The Zombies are so few and far between as to barely be a worry, popping up only when the Laws of Screenplay Structure demand it, and once the girls get their hands on a couple of MAC-10 submachine guns, that worry becomes a distant memory. There's no real danger, here; no concern that Regina and Sam are ever in any serious peril, even once they meet up with the evil scientists. And without that conflict, you're just killing time, waiting it out until the inevitable happy ending.

Night of the Comet is the kind of movie best viewed with a heavy dose of nostalgia for the '80s. Because, even though it is a fun film - and I admit, I had a good time watching it this time around - without the big hair, the bad fashion, the neon lights, and the cover of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, this '80s teen version of The Omega Man doesn't have much else going for it.

[Good]